


Technicality

by SayNevermore



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: As You'd Expect From The Lore, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Temporary Character Death, That's it that's all I have, no beta we die like immortal space pirates, that's all there is to this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:01:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27805768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SayNevermore/pseuds/SayNevermore
Summary: In which Marius and Raphaella conduct an experiment.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Technicality

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for this I just went ha, immortals unphazed by the horrors around them, my kind of town. I can't even claim full originality, it's a variation on that one scene in Scott Westerfeld's Risen Empire, which lives rent free in my head since I have first read it. If you have read the book it's quickly going to be very obvious which one I mean; if you haven't, well... mind the tags.

“Hey doc have you seen _oh what the fuck is this again_.”

Marius only raises his head to give Jonny an unimpressed look from the other side of the medical bay.

“Don’t be rude,” he says. “It’s Raphaella.”

Jonny sighs, draws his gun, and pulls the trigger without even trying to aim. The bullet enters Marius’s skull and projects blood and bone shards in a clean cone on the other side, coating the wall. The body falls on the ground, taking the stool with it in a metallic clank. 

The thing on the surgical chair emits a vaguely throaty vibration. For some reason that Jonny isn’t even going to try understanding, this attempt at communication causes a fit of wet coughing, which shakes its entire form in several different directions. Small, pink ventricles, scattered all across the surface, contract in unison, weakly pushing air through a series of plastic tubes connected to the exposed bronchial tubes. A bit of mucus escapes the open throat in drops of spit. 

One eye is, Jonny realizes, looking at him. An eye attached to the extremity of a ring finger, resting on the armrest. A red wire, plugged into the soft white tissue, wraps loosely around the hand, before burrowing into the flesh of the wrist through a clean square opening in the skin. Jonny finds it re-emerging where the shoulder should be (instead a mess of something that looks like someone took a liver through a meat grinder), and connect to the actual optical nerve, hanging from the empty eye socket. The eye is a familiar icy blue.

Wait. 

“Well, fuck you too,” Marius groans, pushing himself back on her feet and replacing his monoggle properly on his face. A bit of wrung lead falls from his forehead onto the ground. The top of his head is still covered in gore, but his skull is intact again, if not for the part of it where the hair is currently growing back. 

Jonny shrugs. There is a possibility that, somehow, Marius was _not_ responsible for the example of unholy medical malpractice currently sitting between them, and did not deserve to have his brains temporarily blown off, but Jonny is going to go ahead and decide that his tone was pedantic enough to warrant this reaction. Also, how was he supposed to know Marius wasn’t lying? 

The writhing mass of flesh tissue and glistening exposed organs dumped on the surgical chair is, now that Jonny thinks about it, indeed slumped over a pair of metallic wings, whose extremities peek out on the side. Two feet dangle at the bottom of the chair, still wearing brown leather boots, and, at the other extremity, a long tail of blond hair hangs from the top of an open skull. But that’s as much as Jonny can make out. Everything else about Raphaella looks like someone was trying to play rubik’s cube with a corpse. 

“Whose idea was it?” he asks instead of any other question, because at this point, why bother with the why and how?

“Hers,” Marius says. “We’re testing the extent of the mechanism.”

“And that requires turning her into a teriyaki because..?”

“The mechanisms bring us back to our natural shape when we die, but we usually die with all out bits scattered. It’s rebuilding us, mostly, basing itself on what we last looked like, give or take. It also keeps us from aging, it repairs some lethal injuries before they can kill us, and we know it fights infections. But all of this is still related to degeneration or loss of physical matter…”

“Get to the point, doc.”

“Well, there’s no loss of matter here. So far the mechanism seems to believe that physical integrity has not been altered to the point of requiring its intervention. We’re trying to see how far we can push it.”

“ _You’re_ trying. She’s just lying there waiting for all of her insides to have replaced her outsides and _vice versa_.”

“She hasn’t voiced any complaints.”

“Her lungs are in six different pieces.”

In reaction, Jonny gets another gurgling moan, and then, a hand, connected to… well, to the arm, but through twenty centimetres of synthetic veins, nerves and extra muscles, raises a thumbs up in his direction. Marius raises an eyebrow, as if to say, _see?_

Somehow, that just does it. The stench of blood, the intestines hanging out, the general nastiness, he can take, but that hand moving as if nothing of that mattered, that is the thing that is going to make him throw up.

“Okay, you know what; just… call me when you’ve put her back up in… one… piece. Aurora sent a bunch of readings about life forms from the planet we’re nearing and I need her to translate them for me. Preferably, you know, before I get bored and decide to violate the prime directive, but it’s really whatever. Wouldn’t want to keep you away from your precious pet project.”

“The prime directive doesn’t cover genocide, Jonny. You’re thinking of the Geneva Convention.”

“ _Whatever_ , Marius.”

He turns on his heels, fast, but not fast enough to justify the sudden loss of balance that immediately follows. That, he discovers once the back of his head has hit the surgical chair, is because he has just walked on the bullet he shot Marius with, still rolling around on the floor of the lab. 

The blood he is now covered with is because, while falling, he instinctively grabbed one of Raphaella’s hanging blood vessels. 

Behind him, Marius lets out a string of swears, the kind only he and Tim have assimilated as a natural reaction to mundane annoyances. 

“Yeah, I’m fine, thank you for asking,” Jonny growls, standing back up, vainly trying to swipe the blood off his clothes. 

On the surgical chair, Raphaella gurgles a few times, and her heart, beating hard and fast just outside of her ribcage, starts pumping so wildly to compensate from the blood loss that it just projects more on Jonny’s boots. On the other side of the chair, Marius sighs and, instead of trying to contain the damage, pulls out a pen and starts taking notes. 

It takes, Jonny would say, about ten seconds before the heart stops beating altogether. After that, he looks, stunned and vaguely intrigued, as bits of Raphaella’s body start withering and greening in record time, some falling on the sides as they rot. Then, Raphaella’s wings stretch, getting a satisfying pop from a spine connected to nothing else, and the wreckage of half-decomposed flesh starts to writhe and shine again, as new tissue grows from what remained attached to the mechanism. 

Jonny goes out to change clothes, grabs a cup of that shitty coffee Ivy bought at their last stop but refuses to drink herself, mixes enough whiskey into it to euthanize a horse, and comes back to watch the show. 

Takes four entire hours for Raphaella to be completely remade. 

“Not quite your best performance,” Marius notes, and then he bends down to grab Raphaella’s boots and remove them off the rotting feet still wearing them. 

Raphaella sits up and stretches with a grimace.

“How about next time we use that anaesthetic we found in that lab on New Constantinople? Sitting in that thing for so long really isn’t nice on the back.”


End file.
